After Dark

It’s nearly midnight, and nineteen-year-old Mari Asai sits reading a thick book in a lonely Denny’s in central Tokyo. Tall, lanky, long-haired Takahashi enters the restaurant carrying a trombone case, walks by her table, recognizes her, and introduces himself as a friend of Mari’s sister, the beautiful teen model Eri Asai. He sits uninvited across from Mari, and orders chicken salad.

That conversation at Denny’s begins Haruki Murakami’s After Dark (trans. Jay Rubin; Knopf, 2007), which traces the interconnected lives of several lost souls as they wander through the dream-and-nightmare world of early morning Tokyo. A student of Chinese, Mari is called to interpret the shrieks of a Chinese prostitute who has been beaten by her client; the Chinese gang that pimps for the prostitute begins searching for her assailant, while Murakami follows the john back to his office, where he works through the night fixing bugs in a computer program. Mari and Takahashi’s conversations grow more intimate, and Mari finally reveals that her sister has been sleeping almost uninterrupted for two months.

At least in English translation, After Dark is written with the understated but haunting simplicity of a fairy tale. His dark and troubled characters inhabit a world of mirrors, screens, and masks, a world of gray shadow rather than black and white, a world permeated by a vague undefinable menace. On the evidence of this novel, Murakami more than deserved his Franz Kafka Prize.